'Only Murders in the Building' review: Season 4 offers a wild, fun ride

WHAT IT'S ABOUT With their podcasting success, the "Only Murders in the Building" trio find themselves in Hollywood's crosshairs. A movie deal is quickly secured, and casting complete, with Zach Galifianakis set to play Oliver (Martin Short), while Eva Longoria is Mabel (Selena Gomez) and Eugene Levy is Charles (Steve Martin). What the three don't yet know is that Charles' close friend and stunt double Saz (Jane Lynch) appears to have met her end (The third season closing scene; shot through the window of Charles' apartment, where she had gone to get a bottle of wine.)

There are a whole lot of surprise cameos in this 10-episode Hooray-for-Hollywood season (no spoilers) but we can reveal one — Richard Kind (most recently Cousin Andy on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") who is a particularly strange resident of the Arconia dubbed "Stink-Eye Joe."

MY SAY You don't need to go to film school to know how important the "double" is for filmmakers. Doubles are the stuff of Hitchcock, psychological thrillers, "Star Wars" and just about everything else. And so, this fourth season — in homage to Hollywood — is all about doubles, clones, doppelgängers, dream selves and twins. A season of vaunted trickery (because film is all about trickery), each episode is named for a classic movie that was either pointedly about doubles (for example, 2002's "Adaptation," Episode 5), or not ("Gates of Heaven," Episode 2). A thread is pulled from the classic that establishes the respective episode's plot, but which thread is up to you to figure out (Google will be helpful.) Hence, more trickery.

All of this gets down to some deceptively simple questions in season 4, like — did someone want to kill Saz or Charles, or both? In some weirdly fundamental way, aren't Charles and Saz the same person? She certainly was when she was his stunt double all those years ago on "Brazos," except why would anyone want to hurt lovable Saz/Chaz anyway?

Also this question throughout: In what sense is film "real," or reflective of our deepest, most enigmatic — or murderous — human impulses?

If this review is giving you a headache then don't blame the messenger. This fourth season really does want you to think about the art of movies and moviemaking (it succeeds) but especially wants you to have fun (succeeds again). Nothing, or almost nothing, here will force a fan reevaluation of "OMITB," other than the obvious point that the show has set out to shatter its own rules, and does.

The fourth opens with a shot of stock footage film "grain," with Charles in voice-over telling us that since the invention of motion pictures, "countless images have been emblazoned in our memories ..." Soon enough, the three are heading out to Hollywood to take a meeting with one overly enthusiastic studio development chief, Bev Melon (Molly Shannon, in scene-stealer mode).

 This season may be about Hollywood but very much remains Manhattan-bound because, as it happens, the Arconia has a twin double too — the west tower, domicile of the so-called "westies" (who include Kind, with an eye-patch, also in scene-stealer mode). In homage to "Rear Window," the easties from across the Arconia courtyard — Charles, Oliver and Mabel — can see directly into the mysterious and quite possibly sinister lives of these oddballs, and vice versa. Suspects abound, red herrings too.

This 4th is often funny, but there's a melancholy throughline as well: Like the movies, life is but a dream, so seize the moment if you can find something to seize. As such, Mabel remains the beating heart of "OMITB" and the sadness at its core. Gomez (still awaiting that Emmy win) just might steal the whole season.

BOTTOM LINE Wild, fun ride